24 March 2017

UPDATED 28/03/2017 - 15:42GMT* - In the latest chapter of new and creative forms of silencing / eliminating from view, accurate and relevant information about certain characters of Venezuela's underworld, this week I've been battling with yet another DDoS attack against my first, now inactive, website: vcrisis.com. This time round, thousands of smartphones are being used, presumably without owners consent, to direct traffic (POST and GET requests) to my site. But the more interesting aspect is that most traffic comes from a handful of Google Cloud's IP addresses.

You read that right, DoSers are using Google's power to crash my server. For public benefit and future reference, abused addresses are:

Logs show thousands of such requests, to the extent that the server has been shut down and special measures have been put in place by my web hosting provider. I have, of course, shared relevant data with Google's Project Shield, whose staff alerted me to increased traffic towards my vcrisis.com site the other day.

Some time ago I alerted Matt Cutts about RaFa's astroturfing. I guess he's having to do all the criminals' white washing again. And he's succeeding at it I reckon. Google searches for Ramiro Helmeyer return these results these days: surely David Beckham, Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg wouldn't be proud of such usage of their images.

* An update: the good folks at Project Shield sent a message saying "It was a Layer 7 HTTP flood DDoS attack." Further investigation revealed that Project Shield own IP addresses were indeed used in the DDoS attack. What interests me is the level of sophistication Venezuelan crooks are employing to scrub their reputations. Considering the staggering amounts of money they've gotten through corruption, and the kind of services employed, is not difficult to foresee that their past misdeeds will be eliminated from public domain.

Alek Boyd created Vcrisis.com and started blogging about Venezuela in Oct. 2002. Since, he has worked as an independent researcher, reporter, lobbyist, civil and political rights activist, and has experience in strategic and media consulting throughout Latin America. In 2006, Alek became the first blogger ever to shadow a presidential candidate in Venezuela. In 2009 he gained a MA (merits) in Spanish American Studies (King's College London). Alek can be contracted to do due diligence on individuals and companies in Venezuela and LatAm. Contact: @alekboyd.

Most of the investigations I've published since 2002 are related to individuals and companies with suspect connections to Hugo Chavez's regime, whose actions would've gone unnoticed otherwise. Exposing the $2-trillion dictator is no easy task, and so donations are always welcome.